Depending on who you ask, the practice is an innocuous business tool or an Orwellian evocation of Big Brother.

As more and more companies monitor their workers and the modes of monitoring expand, employers inevitably are picking up more than company business. At the same time, there is more personal business being conducted at work in an era of long workdays and two-career families.

Barbara Ehrenreich; The New York Times, March 5, 2000, SECTION: Section 6; Page 88; TITLE: Warning: This Is a Rights-Free Workplace // acs-VT2001

Purse searches, though, are relatively innocuous compared with the sophisticated chemical and electronic forms of snooping adopted by many companies in the 90's. The American Management Association reports that in 1999 a record two-thirds of major American companies monitored their employees electronically: videotaping them; reviewing their e-mail and voice-mail messages; and, most recently, according to Lewis Maltby, president of the Princeton-based National Workrights Institute, monitoring any Web sites they may visit on their lunch breaks. Nor can you count on keeping anything hidden in your genes; a growing number of employers now use genetic testing to screen out job applicants who carry genes for expensive ailments like Huntington's disease.

Federal limits on the use of lie detector tests haven't prevented employers from getting inside workers' heads with personality tests. Video cameras have popped up even in workplace bathrooms as companies test the boundaries of privacy law in the name of crime and drug prevention. But the biggest setback came with court rulings in the 1980s, allowing employers to test prospective hires as well as some active employees for illegal drug use, according to Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco employment lawyer and privacy advocate.

"Taking bodily fluids is the most intrusive search you can subject a human being to," Palefsky said. "Once you sanction that, you're basically saying that all less-intrusive searches are OK."